Jailed Italian Financier In Coma After Poisoning

March 21, 1986|By Uli Schmetzer, Special to The Tribune.

ROME — Italian financier Michele Sindona, sentenced to life imprisonment two days earlier for ordering a murder, was poisoned Thursday morning in his prison cell. He was hospitalized in a deep coma and was not expected to survive.

Investigating Magistrate Francesco di Socio said traces of potassium cyanide had been found in Sindona`s blood and urine.

The 65-year-old Sicilian-born financier, who once owned four banks, collapsed in his cell during breakfast. A guard, watching on closed-circuit television, ran to his aid.

Late Thursday Sindona lay in a coma at the Civil Hospital in Voghera, northern Italy, his condition apparently irreversible, according to a hospital spokesman. Dr. Luigi Paleari said an electroencephalogra m found no brain wave activity.

Only a few months ago, the financier, once considered the wizard of Italo-American finances, told a journalist he wanted to return to the United States to serve his 25-year sentence for fraud in the collapse of the Franklin National Bank in New York.

``I am afraid I`ll end up like Picciotta,`` he said. Picciotta, a Mafia informer in the 1950s, was poisoned with potassium cyanide. The poison was in a cup of coffee served to Picciotta in his cell at Palermo`s main penitentiary.

Sindona`s lawyer, Moreste Dominoni, said: ``I saw him last night. He was calm and composed. He wanted me to pressure for his return to the United States.``

Officials offered no suggestions of who might have poisoned Sindona or, if he did it himself, how he got the poison.

He was under 24-hour TV observation in the top-security prison at Voghera and his food was prepared in a special kitchen under the supervision of prison guards.

A man of many resources who once organized his own kidnaping and shooting, Sindona`s sudden collapse prompted suspicion that the white-haired financier with the craggy face had pulled another ``stunt.``

During the Milan trial Sindona was ill on several occasions.

Sindona has been linked not only to murder but also to the collapse of financial empires, the mysterious P2 Masonic lodge, the Sicilian Mafia and leading political figures.

After seven years of investigations, a Milan court on Tuesday found Sindona guilty of hiring a professional gunman in the United States in 1979 to kill Giorgio Ambrosoli, the bank examiner appointed to unravel Sindona`s complex financial manipulations at the Banca Privata Italiana.

The killer, William Arico, known as ``Billy the Exterminator,`` was arrested in the United States and confessed to killing Ambrosoli in Milan. Arico fell to his death in an attempt to escape from a federal prison in New York in 1984.

Sindona, a Sicilian, built up a vast Italo-American financial empire in the 1960s and early `70s through speculation and the astute manipulation of loans.

In those days his fame was such that he could walk into any government or Vatican office. Former Premier Giulio Andreotti nominated him once half-jokingly for ``the Oscar of the lire.`` Sindona contributed millions of dollars to the party coffers of the ruling Christian Democrats.

But his precarious financial empire, kept together with luck and cunning, began to come unglued in 1974, when he could not cover a $180 million ``hole`` in the accounts of his Banca Privata Italiana.

Sindona fled, first to Taiwan, then to New York, where he surrendered to police in a public telephone booth. Out on bail, he smuggled himself to Sicily via Greece and organized his own kidnaping, using John Gambino, an Italo-American Mafia boss.

This week Gambino and other members of his gang were sentenced to three to six years in prison for the faked kidnaping. A P2 Masonic doctor, Joseph Miceli, was sentenced to one year for having ``carefully`` shot Sindona in the leg to make the kidnaping look real.

Sindona still faces charges of involvement in P2 affairs. The Masonic lodge is accused of conspiring against the state. The inquiries into Ambrosoli`s murder led investigators to the lodge.

The financier also is involved in the collapse of the Banca Ambrosiano in 1980. In the wake of the bank`s collapse, its president, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging from a bridge in London; and the president of the Vatican bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus of Cicero, Ill., was under investigation for dealings with the bank.

All these investigations will lose their main protagonist if Sindona remains in a coma or dies. But their shelving would alleviate many a headache in Italy.